From Craft to Code

I have no idea if this is the best approach to a project but I'm implementing the MVC methodology to this web app that I'm building. As in, I'm first going to build as much of the model as I can then as much of the views as I can before working on the controller. As I mentioned yesterday, what I do know is that I will need two schemas for this project - one for the snippets and one for the users. I will be using a noSQL database because I already know how to use Mongoose to connect Mongo to my Node application. One trick I knew I would have to add in order to 'link' the two collections in my database is on line 15. I knew I would have to give each snippet a way to connect to its owner in order to only display that owner's snippets. This probably would have been easier to do in a SQL database where tables have a bit more structure and can include foreign keys to reference other tables. However, I wanted to use tools I have already learned how to use to accom...

Today I've been tasked with teaching myself something new! In the coming weeks it will be time to decide what language to specialize in. I have the options of React, Java, and Ruby. All are wonderful options but as I've worked throughout this program I am still leaning towards a more visual career. That entails continuing to learn front-end development. In turn that makes React my best option. So today I'm going to get a little ahead of myself and learn some basics of React. I have no plans to build anything snazzy. From the little I've read about React it can be intimidating to get into. There are a lot of moving parts to code but it seems especially true of React. Just finding a tutorial on React itself instead of all of the other packages and frameworks that go into it was difficult. If I can just populate a page of images today using React I'll be satisfied! I'm using the first two tutorials listed here:  http://andrewhfarmer.com/getting-started-tuto...

The last 48 hours have been super intense! Not only am I learning basic web concepts about how information is sent and received over the internet but also the language used to manipulate that information. Those languages are also built on packages which are chunks of code called modules. Those packages all have their own syntax that may or may not interact well with other packages that are needed. My best analogy (roughly) is trying to create a custom greeting card for a customer. I have dozens of stamps and dozens of paper punches (these are analogous to modules because they are pre-made tools I use to create an embellishment that is then used in addition to my other crafting skills that make the card). These stamps and punches were all purchased at different places so not all of the styles and shapes line up with one another. I have to use a specific method to make those 'packages' work together to produce the card I have in mind. All of this code is completely done in th...

After learning the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, Terminal, and GitHub I'm now moving into back end development! Our first reading is on Node.js which is neither a language nor a program but a way for the JavaScript language to interact with browsers. I'm not entirely sure what that means yet but I'm confident I will by the end of the day. Until then, I'm working on our latest weekly project. It is a search page that uses the iTunes API to find music! The hardest part so far has been figuring out how to play audio and that was ultimately easier than I expected. I'm very fortunate to be learning how to code now with HTML5 and CSS3 that have a lot of included tags and elements. Back in the day I'm sure these projects would have been much more intensive! Here I have some JavaScript that begins a function when a search result is clicked. Once it has been clicked, the audio file is plugged into the HTML (hardcodes it) and displays the artist's name ...

If you haven't heart already - The Iron Yard went public on Thursday that it's locations will be shutting down after all current students complete their courses. This, naturally, impacted a lot of us emotionally but I know, for myself, that I'm still in this to learn as much as possible. I'm incredibly lucky that the staff here has built the Raleigh campus together and they also will stick this out until the end. Outside of that, this week was the final week of front end development before we move on to back end. Thursday and Friday we broke into groups and were inspired to begin our Hackathon project. Our theme was 'Mashup' so my team decided to do an arcade style page with multiple mini games. I, specifically, offered to do a Choose Your Own Adventure Game. I chose to write a 'tour' of Iron Yard's Raleigh campus. After a greeting and an input field for your name, you enter each room as you choose. The tricky part was to make sure that once a room...

As we round out our month of front-end development (I can't believe it we've come this far) our final task is to collaborate on a project. We've been challenged to complete a 48 hour Hackathon with the theme of 'Mashup'. My group has picked an arcade-style page that includes multiple mini games that are all interactive and show off various skills we've learned. My particular mini game is a Choose Your Own Adventure game, or as it turns out, a Tour of Iron Yard with Stacey our Campus Director! I'm not as advanced as I would like to be but the logic I implemented to complete the task worked! It got pretty messy pretty fast but I was able to accomplish a series of alerts nested in one another. My tour is three rooms long and once you 'enter' a room it can not be reentered. I did this using nested if statements linked to dialogue boxes with template literals. This worked great but if I ever decided to add additional rooms it would get close to impossib...

It's my birthday! But it's also Monday so I'm back to programming just like any other week. I'm ahead, for now, and spent the weekend working on a personal project! Instead of sketching it out like I know I should I jumped right in and expanded on my project until I got stuck. Then, instead of working out that knot in my code I just jumped into another project instead. Probably not best practice here. On nights and weekends I'm still crafting and practicing photography. I'm trying to build a site for each of those. Ultimately, what I would like to do is build just one single site that ties both hobbies together. I don't have anything down on paper yet but I'm willing to bet I will tonight. As these sites progress I'll update on my bugs and how I worked through them. Right now, on my photography page, I'm have the hardest time getting my images to work properly. I have them embedded in my HTML just fine but CSS is a different kind of cranky. I c...

Never have I ever put so much thought into how a calculator works. Our weekly assignment, due this upcoming Friday, is to create a static webpage that will display a green calculator that not just looks pretty but functions correctly. The looking pretty is HTML and CSS which we covered a grand total of two weeks ago and I'm already feeling rusty on. The functionality is all JavaScript. I seriously can't believe that in three weeks I'm already familiar with and using (kind of awkwardly) these three languages. In about five hours time I accomplished all of the above. I have green buttons that when pushed are displayed in the empty field at the top of the page as well as can mathematically work (as long as the operation is simple and done one step at a time). For now my GitHub link is  https://github.com/victoriarainc/week-03-project  but I will update later this week with the actual page so you can interact with my code! Yay progress! All in all I'm super proud but...

JavaScript is if loops, DOM manipulation, template literals, nested arrays and objects, and a load of new commands I have literally never worked with or even seen before last week. Here I am feeling like I've taken the first baby step (a huge step!) in to the right direction. I can actually start a project, ask the right questions, and use the correct resources. I may not be able to finish. It may take me all day. But I can start and I'm not going to take that achievement for granted. https://victoriarainc.github.io/week-02-project/ This page isn't beautiful or interactive but all that was required of me was to print those same answers to the console (a tool in Chrome you can access by right-clicking on that page and clicking 'Inspect'). Before submitting I realized my page was just completely empty. A white page. Which is what my instructors are expecting but I didn't want to settle for that. I had a few extra hours last night and spent that time 'd...

Coding is all a logic game. I've discovered it's using tools in conjunction to produce a result. Brain teaser doesn't even begin to describe it! My head feels like a swarm of bees caught in tiny net trying to solve this one! https://github.com/victoriarainc/blackjack If you take a look at the link you'll see a program (well, a bunch of notes that resemble some bizarre string of consciousness) that calculates the total of your digital hand in the game of Blackjack. I've never thought so critically about the value of a card before! Throwing in the curveball of Ace being one of two values depending on your cards really throws me for a loop. Taking it one step at a time is key though and something I definitely need to improve on. This bit of JavaScript isn't quite as crafty as some other very visual aspects but it is still super addictive! In the same way solving a word search is though. I'm completely infuriated until I finally find the word I haven...

It's only Tuesday of this week and my head is already at capacity. We're quickly moving into more JavaScript by going over DOM (Data Object Model) today. It's essentially a way to write HTML without writing HTML. The concepts seemed pretty straightforward in the reading last night. When you want to target an element by it's class, there is a command for that. When you want to target a whole document, there is a command for that! I feel optimistic about today's activities and I'm looking forward to some of the crazy JavaScript commands that can do funky effects on my pages! Until then, I've found a resource I'd love to share! I'm definitely a 'gold star' learner and love to see my 'progress' tracked. CodeCombat is a wonderful interactive game for beginners of almost every age. You control your character in the command line and complete certain tasks with given commands. If you haven't played yet I highly recommend it! Just l...

This weekend was supposed to be a retreat into beloved hobbies while I felt ahead in content for The Iron Yard. I achieved this goal on Saturday by going to a local Stamp Art Tour here in Raleigh and buying more than I needed but certainly less than I expected! After organizing all my new product and setting my self up to craft last night I thought I would spend all day today making cards and scrapbooking. Instead, I find myself working on index cards, rewriting my notes to look prettier, and knocking out enough changes on my side project to push a commit to github! Currently, I have a facebook page with a small collection of albums that hold some of my pictures. It's pretty much a super informal portfolio:  https://www.facebook.com/viphotography.raleigh/ . It certainly isn't a terrible way to go about displaying past work. But it isn't the greatest. As a way to both improve my brand and practice my development and design skills I've started to build my own page. I kn...

This week has been the week of a Tuesday holiday; both incredibly short and surprisingly long! I've been consistently on top of my work out of habit, thankfully, but I'm ready for material that I feel solid on. I guess in a way I should embrace this uncomfortable feeling that I don't understand what I'm doing as technology itself is never just one thing and constantly evolves. As we get more into JavaScript I will be excited to see how to actually use it in my HTML and CSS. So far we've mostly covered concepts like truthy/falsey, if statements, if/else statements, and pushing to git pages. Compared to last week it feels like we barely covered anything but I'm happy to take this step by step now. The weekly project was a challenge but I knew myself well enough to space out the web page one piece at a time. All of the concepts I thought would be difficult, like parallax and favicon, were unbelievably easy. Yet I still feel shaky on when to use flex and when to u...

Now that we're in Week 2 we've gotten into a more secure, more custom routine that fits our cohort's needs. Rather than jumping into new material every day we have an opportunity in the morning to both go over the previous day's activity and to bring up any questions we had about the reading material for today's lesson. I've also had the opportunity to confront my learning curves: the first week I was learning SO much more than just the given material. I was not only grasping the first concepts of git, pushing to github, basic html, and css but also how to use a mac, what shortcuts I have available, how to work in the command line, how to learn in the flipped classroom model, AND generic programming vocabulary that doesn't actually line up very well with English definitions of the same words. We've been given a week assignment to turn in by this Friday but I went ahead and jumped into it over the weekend. I've only worked on one page so far but I f...

After one week of diving straight into hands on coding my brain is fried but my spirits are high! I know there is so much work ahead of me but knowing that I'm capable of learning at this pace is really encouraging. Just five short days ago I didn't know anything about command line, knew conceptually how to push project files to git but never actually had confidently, and certainly hadn't ever created a mock up of a web page from scratch with HTML and CSS. Along the way I've discovered there were more road blocks in my way than I realized. I haven't ever been familiar with Mac interface so just looking for my files and switching between windows took way longer than it should be. I'm not super in tune with my learning style either so it has been difficult to sort between what I didn't understand and what I couldn't remember. Any mistake I've made along the way I doubted my understanding of the material instead of assuming I spelled something wrong o...

So far there hasn't been a topic we didn't, as a class, just jump in to. While at least half of the class has previous experience with HTML and CSS the rest of us were immediately staring at a blank text editor wondering how to start 'just coding'. By the time the day ended I had a web page that looked decent but I had fumbled through the entire activity and it took me twice as long as most others. But I did it. Not to toot my own horn but it looked great too! I had done that. Sure, I had collaborated to see what the proper commands were for some things and googled how to make a rounded corner but I had still been the one to physically type everything. Next time the same project might take me half the amount of time because I won't spend an hour figuring out whether to add margins in percentages or pixels. I have a list in my notebook of broad ideas that I would love to go back over when the class is finished. There are some proper procedures and 'etiquett...

Two days ago I started The Iron Yard in Raleigh. If you haven't heard of Iron Yard yet, you will. This is a bootcamp style certificate program in web development. We have four weeks of learning front end development, four weeks of back end dev, and four weeks of 'specialization' or language learning. It's Day Three and I've already learned more than I did in a year of free online courses and tutorials. And I. Am. Exhausted. But exhilarated! The first day covered how to work in command line and using terminal to work in git and push commits to github. The second we covered basic html and even created a three page interactive 'site' without any css or javascript. More importantly though, there is a lot of focus on the REAL work. We are learning how to 'just do it' without understanding the bigger picture or knowing how it works or why you're doing it. Programming is very much a second language and immersion is key. Now this code snippet may ...